I’ve heard multiple stories of the idea of the confidence gap. There’s a lot to the idea of it, but it comes down to the idea that women tend to wait until they feel more confident before taking a chance. Studies show when it comes to taking a risk or asking for a promotion, women usually will wait until they feel that they can do 100% of the tasks required while men will go ahead when they feel they can do 60%. This is something that I have tried to overcome, but it is not easy when it almost is a natural feeling that I want to be perfect before I take a chance. I don’t want to look stupid or make a mistake and have someone tell me that I shouldn’t have tried.
I am getting better about taking chances, but that usually only happens when those chances only affect me and not anyone else. If someone else may need to make up for my mistakes or it could delay or affect someone else’s day, I tend to not want to try. It’s hard to not be scared that someone might be upset with me if I try and fail. But I also know that if someone took a chance and it affected me when they couldn’t accomplish it, I wouldn’t blame them because at least they tried. I just need to believe that someone else would feel the same way about me.
I had the opportunity to try to take a chance last week. With this election, we have all been working hard at creating different things like graphics and videos. We do have people who’s primary jobs are to create things like that, but sometimes things come up and either they are swamped with other work (or with life since this is all volunteer work) or we have to pitch in to help because we have a time crunch and the person who typically does the work is not available. Everyone is happy to pitch in where they can because we all are passionate about what we are doing and want to make sure we do everything we can to get the word out about the vote and the slate.
We had recorded some videos recently and they were being edited into individual videos for each candidate that filmed. But we had an idea to turn it into a larger video that included everyone who was there that day. But the person who was editing the video did not have the time to put that video together. I have edited a few things before, but nothing like this. But I said I would give it a shot. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I wanted to try. I knew if I couldn’t do it, someone else could try and we wouldn’t be any worse off than we were before I started. So I was sent all the video footage from the shoot and spent some time watching it and seeing what made sense to me as a bigger video.
Fortunately, the concept came to me quickly. And, while I’m sure there are multiple ways I could have done the editing a lot faster or more efficiently, I had to do it the way I knew how and pull the clips I knew I was going to use and put them in one section and put all the extra clips in another. Then I got to trying to sort those clips and organizing them and moving them around until I was happy with the order and it seemed to make sense to me.
Fortunately, I was able to send multiple versions of the work in progress to some people from the slate for notes and they were able to give me feedback on what they thought and if they felt things needed to be moved around. They also got me the still frame for the end of the video that included the required disclosure that the video was not paid for with union funds. And my friend Ben had a lot of credits on a royalty-free music website so he let me use his login information and download a few options so we tested some music clips out. When I originally tested the clips out, I was torn between 4 different ones. But once I put them all into the video I made, one stood out as the clear winner.
From the time I got the video footage until the time I finished exporting the final file, it was only about 24 hours (and probably about 8-10 hours of total work). That’s not that long, but it also is only about a 2-minute video. When I was done, I sent it out to the leaders of the slate and said that I could fix anything if they noticed anything off and for some reason, I felt like I also had to apologize because I’m not an editor. Thinking back, I feel so stupid that I apologized for my work, but at the time I did it. I guess it was that feeling that I wasn’t 100% ready to edit a video so there was something for me to be sorry for. But I was ready enough to create something that I am now extremely proud of.
This video has been posted on our social media and I think everyone is very happy about it. And now I am happy about it too. Taking the risk of editing a video even though I wasn’t completely sure I could do it worked in my favor. And not only did it work in my favor, I proved to myself that I can do something that I questioned I could do. It wasn’t easy and I had to look up how to do a lot of things, but I got it done. And while this isn’t something I will probably do regularly, it is something that I want to practice a bit more so I feel more confident doing when I need to edit something in the future.
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